“The Right Kind of Crazy”: How Patrol Officers Police the Boundaries of Mental Illness through Hybridized Strategies

Abstract

How to better police mental illness is an evergreen component of criminal justice reform agendas. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has, like many departments, adopted specialized strategies designed to improve these encounters by tasking officers with both care and control responsibilities. These hybridized policing strategies are illustrative of a larger trend of managing social marginality through institutions that increasingly destabilize the penal/welfare state binary. This article draws from fieldwork with the LAPD to analyze how patrol officers construct the category of “mental illness” and deploy hybridized strategies. The analysis focuses on the inflection points that shape how a subject is categorized and the call’s disposal to understand how policing from the “murky middle” of state governance unfolds on the ground. Findings show how officers strategically invoke the pressure of time and the power of place to construct this category and deploy specialized resources when resolving trouble case, or “5149 and a half,” calls. Here, hybridized strategies function to manage social marginality through a governance of problem solving that appears uninterested in doing either care or control. The article concludes by reflecting on the project of hybridizing care and control to police mental illness specifically and social marginality more broadly.